Archives for May 24, 2013

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two major off-Broadway revivals of Conor McPherson’s The Weir and Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder. The first is extraordinary, the second very problematic. Here’s an excerpt.

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Theater starts with storytelling, of which ghost stories are the most primal kind. This helps to explain the long-lasting appeal of Conor McPherson’s “The Weir,” whose successful 1999 Broadway run introduced New York playgoers to the most admired Irish playwright of his generation. “The Weir” consists of four ghost stories told by a quartet of drinkers who find themselves spending a stormy evening together at a rural Irish pub. On the surface, that’s all there is to it, but scratch the surface and “The Weir” proves to be a profound meditation on the twin themes of loneliness and community, told so theatrically that you’ll savor each peat-scented phrase. The trick is to get the details right, and the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival, staged with sure-footed simplicity by Ciarán O’Reilly, is totally believable. From the inch-thick brogues of the actors to the neon signs on the walls of the barroom set, it’s as convincing as a deathbed confession.

Deceptive simplicity is the hallmark of “The Weir,” which has just five characters, a bartender (Billy Carter), three regulars (Dan Butler, Sean Gormley and John Keating) and an outsider, a young woman named Valerie (Tessa Klein) who has moved to the rural village where the play is set to find peace and quiet. Small-town life, of course, is never as quiet as it looks from the outside–Mr. McPherson hints at the daily vexations that arise from seeing the same small group of people day after day after day–but Valerie has brought her own turmoil with her, and no sooner do her new friends tell their elaborate stories of spooky doings than she ups the ante with a tale of terror that turns out to be both true and tragic.

“The Weir” is carefully structured to build up to Valerie’s big scene, and Ms. Klein knows how to deliver the payoff. Even during the first part of the play, when she does little but react shyly to the other characters, your eye keeps flicking to her, and you won’t be able to look anywhere else once she takes center stage….

John Turturro is an actor so distinctive in style that he can easily swamp a play to which he isn’t closely suited. While he couldn’t have been better as the pathetically ludicrous Lopakhin of Andrei Belgrader’s 2011 Classic Stage Company revival of “The Cherry Orchard,” the two men have fired wide of the target with Henrik Ibsen’s “The Master Builder,” in which Mr. Turturro plays an aging architect whose comfortable life is disrupted by a surprise visit from a pretty nymphet (Wrenn Schmidt) with mayhem on her mind. The seven members of the cast are all highly accomplished performers, but no two of them seem to be acting in the same show, and Ibsen’s uneasy but thought-provoking mixture of naturalism and symbolism (who is that girl, anyway?) has been transformed by Mr. Belgrader into a cartoonish stage portrayal of a midlife crisis…

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I reflect on two recent opera productions, one modern and the other postmodern. Here’s an excerpt.
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The Metropolitan Opera recently presented a three-performance run of “Dialogues of the Carmelites,” Francis Poulenc’s 1957 opera about a group of nuns who were guillotined in the French Revolution. It was a revival of John Dexter’s 1977 production, not a new staging, but I didn’t hear anyone complaining. Mr. Dexter’s “Dialogues” is universally regarded by connoisseurs as one of the Met’s greatest theatrical achievements….
In a way, “Dialogues” is a kind of operatic time capsule. Long an international byword for artistic conservatism, the Met was notoriously slow to embrace contemporary stagecraft. Not so the modern-minded Mr. Dexter, who had become the company’s director of productions in 1974 and was endeavoring to update its creaky style. The stark, monumental-looking set for “Dialogues,” which was designed by the late David Reppa, was a slap in the face to old-fashioned operagoers who preferred big, fancy sets with imitation trees. Today it looks classic…I thought of the Met’s “Dialogues” when I read about Burkhard C. Kosminski’s recent Deutsche Oper am Rhein production of Richard Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” a postmodern staging that was set in the Nazi era. Yes, there were gas chambers, and yes, the public was so scandalized that the company responded by scrapping the production….
Not having seen Mr. Kosminski’s “Tannhäuser,” I can’t say whether it was any good or not. Nor am I reflexively averse to productions of the classics that seek to update them in provocative ways. (The funniest “As You Like It” that I’ve ever seen, Kurt Rhoads’ 2007 Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production, was mounted in the style of a bottom-of-the-bill B Western.) But I’ve suffered through more than enough second- and third-rate postmodern opera stagings to be suspicious of any director who thinks that it’s a smart idea to turn “Tannhäuser” into a Holocaust-themed exercise in Irony Lite….
What has always struck me about the Met’s staging of “Dialogues of the Carmelites,” by contrast, is its straightforward, unironic seriousness of tone. Messrs. Dexter and Reppa made no attempt whatsoever to superimpose an alien directorial concept on Poulenc’s tragic tale of martyrdom. Instead they used the visual language of modernism to tell the terrible tale of the Carmelite nuns in as direct and universal a way as possible–and 36 years after the fact, the results still look timelessly true….
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Read the whole thing here.

“‘But Larry,’ she smiled. ‘People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they’d have been answered by now.’
“Larry chuckled.
“‘Don’t laugh as if I’d said something idiotic,’ she said sharply.
“‘On the contrary I think you’ve said something shrewd. But on the other hand you might say that if men have been asking them for thousands of years it proves that they can’t help asking them and have to go on asking them.'”
Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, ran earlier this season at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. It previously closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, … [Read More...]

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]